18 posted 2 years ago by pkvi 2 years ago by pkvi +19 / -1 29 comments share 29 comments share save hide report block hide replies
Looks like the computer had 36 banks of 1kilowords ea. fixed memory and 2kilowords rewritable memory. All in assembly.
The tightest code I have ever seen is a chess playing game in 4k.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y37tXoBDx0
Many years ago I help port a 2D version of Space War to a Z-80 processor
I think we had 16 kilobytes to play with.
It was played on an oscilloscope.
A lot of it was fixed code -- like the gravity tables (no real time floating point math)
So that is roughly in the ballpark of NASA.
I took apart an old (broken) mechanical adding machine that would do division.
A million little metal parts.
This was designed without the aid of a computer -- just pencil and paper.
I came to the conclusion --- people were smarter back then.
We are spoiled today.
NASA got started with Germans.